I've had this installed on my Miyoo Mini for months but thought I'd give it a go after it did so well in Back Page Pod's recent Best Games of 2003 draft. Not having played a Wario Ware game before, but knowing vaguely what to expect, I thought it was great fun. The daft animations and funny little noises made me laugh out loud frequently, and the creativity but also accessibility of each of the microgames was impressive - it's remarkable how immediately you know exactly how to do, often just from a one word prompt, like 'Dodge!', 'Find!' or 'Praise!'. Favourite games include the one where you have to shake hands with the border collie, and the one where you have to use scarab beetle Wario to guide a golf ball into a hole, after which he laughs maniacally.

I will say, however, that I completed the 'campaign', for want of a better word, in about sixty minutes one Sunday afternoon and then went back to the endless mode to play all of the games in each level, which only took a few more sessions. It's a very short game, then, but I guess this is missing the point: anyone looking for a rich single-player experience should look elsewhere; this is very much a game to have a quick blast on while you're waiting for the kettle to boil, or cooking dinner, or, as Wario would probably have wanted, when taking a dump.

I don't know that much about the series as a whole, but I understand that all of the sequels never quite captured the magic of this first game. That said, I'd be interested to know if people recommended either of the Switch games for multiplayer, as the formula feels like it could make for a great party game.

I missed this when it was on Game Pass but picked up a Steam key for a tenner. If you don't know it, Cult of the Lamb is sort of like a town-building or farming sim with the twist that, instead of establishing a cutesy village à la Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, you play as a sweet little lamb who's been charged by a satanic figure to develop a ritualistic cult in his honour. As such, your primary currencies are the faith and devotion of your followers, who you can brainwash, sacrifice and cannibalise as you see fit. Like in other games of this type, your main objective is to keep everyone fed and happy. You, in turn, use your followers' reverence to establish gradually grander and more complicated buildings to fill your woodland commune.

When you're not building your cult, you embark on 'crusades' into the neighbouring forests, hacking and slashing through hordes of creepy crawly enemies in procedurally generated dungeons, searching for valuable resources to take home with you. This part of the game has a roguelike whiff to it, with randomised weapons to choose from at the beginning of each run and boons you pick up along the way in the form of tarot cards, like a very pared-back Hades. Unlike Hades, however, it's quite simplistic, really, with a lot of dodge rolling going on and not many synergies to plan for.

Overall, it's a difficult game to review because, on the one hand, I found it very addictive and played it for nearly twenty hours, including several late nights in bed on the Deck, but, on the other, it's not that far removed from a clicker game - certainly, in the town-building bits, you're spending most of your time watching numbers go up and meters refill, and not much else. It's also a bit too easy, and towards the end I was building things arbitrarily because I had nothing else to spend my followers' devotion on, not because what I was building added to the gameplay. There's been some new post-game content added since launch, but by the time the credits rolled I was done.

I bought this in the current Xbox sale for about £8, having not played one of the Mafia games before, and polished it off over the last few evenings. I was expecting a knock-off GTA clone, but it's not, really. Instead, it's 20 completely linear narrative-led missions set in a relatively small, open-ish version of Prohibition era Chicago. You progress from one mission to the next consecutively, with no downtime in between; there are no side-quests or choices as to the order in which you complete each mission, and while you can (sort of) explore the world when you're driving from one part of each level to the next, there's no reason to do so as there's nothing to find. It feels very PS2-era in that regard (which makes sense, seeing as its a remake of a game from 2002), but I found the focus on the story missions with no open-world bloat padding out the runtime quite refreshing.

The missions themselves are...fine. You drive to places, shoot people and generally do lots of gangstery things. You hang out the windows of old-timey cars firing a Tommy gun. You steal lorries full of swag and drive them to lock-ups. You attach bombs to the undersides of rival mobsters' cars and then blow them up. You talk to people using words like 'Youse', 'Dames' and 'Gats' unironically. In fact, pretty much every gangster film cliché is ticked off here, including a section where you have to take someone out using a gun you find taped to the back of a toilet cistern.

Despite how hackneyed the writing and generally mediocre the gameplay is, however, I found the game overall had a certain charm to it - big seven-out-of-ten energy, as the kids say. The voice acting is surprisingly decent, and the story, as much as you've seen it all before, was sufficiently entertaining to keep me playing. The De Niro-lookalike main character, Tommy, is a hatchet man with a heart, and I found him endearing enough to see his story through to its inevitable, bloody conclusion. Despite playing this on the Xbox, nothing about is especially spectacular or technically demanding, and it only took me eight hours to finish, so I'd say it's probably better suited to the Steam Deck (and you can currently get it from CDKeys for less than seven pounds).v That said, I'm not in any rush to play Mafias 2 or 3 based on my time with this.

If you're after something undemanding and you enjoy the period of America that the game quite authentically portrays, then give it a go.

For its first half, this is a 10/10 choose-your-own-adventure visual novel/interactive TV show whose story wouldn't feel out of place in a series of Fargo, or, indeed, in a Coen brothers' film. It takes its foot off the gas very slightly in the second half, but is still extremely entertaining. I started it on Friday night and polished it off in two extended sittings because I found it so compelling. The voice acting is excellent, the choices you have to make are often difficult, and you feel like everything you do has real impact. At the end of each of its six chapters you get given an extended flow-chart showing you what choices you made compared with other possibilities that were available to you, and there's an option to replay sections to follow a different path, but I never wanted to: the story that I ended up telling was the one that I chose to tell; any other story would be somehow untrue, and that sense of ownership is testament to the game's greatness.

I'd be very interested in playing a follow-up to this, but, sadly, there doesn't seem to have been any mention of one since the game's release. It feels like something the devs could announce and publish relatively quickly, however, so hopefully it'll be dropped at an Xbox conference at some point down the road. It came to the PS5 last month, too, so if you've been holding out then I'd definitely pick it up. If you've any interest whatsoever in this sort of game, or if you ever enjoyed anything Telltale made before they lost their way, you should absolutely check it out. I'm annoyed that I took this long to play it.

This is superb, quietly the best puzzle game of 2023, beating both the already excellent Cocoon and Humanity, and the best game of its type that I've played since The Witness, to which it owes a huge debt. The puzzles - almost all of which involve reflecting and refracting light in every conceivable fashion - are ingenious without being overwhelming, and the satisfaction I derived from solving them frequently and involuntarily had me guffawing like a dastardly Bond villain - MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! The entire game is wrapped up in some stunning, megalophobia-inducing scenery that triggered many a Neo.jpg 'Whoa' moment. There's a fantastic ambient soundtrack that has immediately entered my gaming playlist rotation, and the whole thing is topped off with a surprisingly moving, poignant story about life, the universe and (quite literally) everything.

I started playing it on Saturday morning and have ploughed 36 hours into it since then, completely transfixed, which I haven't done with a game for ages. If you like puzzle games, games that make you think, or games with huge and imposing monolithic structures popping up all over the place, making you feel exceedingly tiny and vulnerable, then you must play The Talos Principle II. It's truly awesome (in the original sense of the word).

My DLC-mopping-up-mission continues with this extra content for last year's Resi 4 Remake, and I thought it was very good. It's essentially the already excellent base game remixed and condensed into a tight 5-hour-long package. Playing this time as the lovely Ada Wong, you'll zip through familiar locations from the village, castle and island sections of the original game on a whistle-stop tour, this time making liberal use of your grapple gun to quickly overcome obstacles that Leon takes a lot longer to bypass. In addition to what you've seen before, there are a few new areas to visit and some novel encounters to enjoy, including a couple of set pieces from the original GameCube release that fans last year were disappointed didn't make it into the base game; it's good to see them given their dues here.

The action is as intense and fun as it always was, the game looks and sounds amazing, and, following on from a slightly dodgy launch last March, it's now very well-optimised for PC, too. If you fancy a bit more Las Plagas-popping, Ganado-ganking, Regenerator...razing (?) action, but you can't quite be done with taking 20 hours to replay the full game, then Separate Ways will definitely see you right. At £7.99 RRP, it's excellent value, too. Well done, Capcom!

More Control!

This was a lot less Alan Wake-y than I was expecting. After playing The Foundation earlier in the week, set in a warren of huge caverns, I'd assumed that this would also be set in a brand new area, different from the usual grey office trappings of The Oldest House - maybe I'd be taken to a different version of the Dark Place, I thought, or I'd be transported to Bright Falls and Cauldron Lake.

But no: Jesse gets a call to look into the 'Investigations Sector', a long-lost wing of The Oldest House where most of the assets and geometry are simply re-used from the base game. From there, you're tasked with chasing down a big monster and using light to weaken him, but it was all a bit underwhelming, with no new powers, no new locations and not much to really set it apart from what I'd already experienced. Some of the foreshadowing to the events of Alan Wake 2 were quite cool, especially when you consider this came out over three years before AW2 did, and there are new horde survival and time attack arcade modes which are good fun. Overall, however, like The Foundation, this felt pretty forgettable. That said, it might just be that, having played Control, Alan Wake 2, The Foundation and now this in quick succession, I'm a bit Remedied out, so your mileage may well vary.

After enjoying the likes of The Messenger, Shovel Knight and Huntdown, I thought I'd be up for Gravity Circuit, a retro action-platformer that came out last year to high acclaim, and which I bought for about £7 in a recent sale. Unfortunately, however, I'm having to admit defeat after a couple of hours' play as I'm finding it too fiddly and difficult to be enjoyable.

Its biggest problem is that it's an homage to the Mega Man games, which I've never played, but I understand that they, like this, give the player a choice as to which stages they complete and in what order, right from the very start. While this might seem appealing written down, the consequence of this design decision is that all the stages have relatively flat difficulty curve because any one of them could be the player's first level - in other words, they're all too bloody hard to begin with, or they were to me, anyway. I'm no stranger to difficult games (honest), but I like to feel a sense of progress and momentum when I play them, and most of the time I spent playing Gravity Circuit I felt like I was stumbling from one checkpoint to the next by the skin of my teeth and not really getting any better at the game. There were too many occasions where danger felt inevitable, and rather than being able to avoid it, I just had to pray that my small robot man would soak up the hits without crumbling and booting me back to the checkpoint, and there were too many times when he didn't. If the checkpoints were more plentiful, similar to something like Celeste, for example, then getting from one to the next would feel less like the Sisyphean task than it does, and I found myself getting increasingly annoyed.

Outside of gameplay, the pixel graphics and old-school soundtrack are...fine, but I feel like I've been spoilt after the rich retro art and music of Sea of Stars (above), and there wasn't a great deal here which stood out. Without the nostalgia of Mega Man, or other games of its type, to prop me up, I couldn't see much point in keeping going with this when I was just finding it frustrating more than anything else.

If you're a fan of the games it takes inspiration from, you might feel differently about Gravity Circuit, but it was too punishing for me.

I abandoned this a couple of weeks ago after experiencing lots of technical issues. To an extent, I managed to resolve these and came back to finish it off, but there were still problems with its performance right up to the end. It's difficult for me to put these issues aside as they undeniably did detract from my overall enjoyment of the game, but, regardless, I'd say I've got decidedly mixed feelings on Alan Wake II.

The best thing about the game is how weird and fundamentally different it is from other games, certainly when compared with other triple-A blockbusters. It's a mash-up of a survival horror, a detective game and a interactive TV show, but is very much its own beast, and I can't recall ever playing anything else like it. It's also a very expensive-feeling game, which is to its credit - you can definitely appreciate every one of the 13 years that Remedy have reportedly spent developing it. The lighting, in particular, is stunning, and a lot of what pushed me through to the end of my 20-odd-hour playthrough was just basking in how good the game looked and how detailed the different areas were.

Unfortunately, however, the fundamental gameplay on offer here just isn't that fun. Simply put, there's too much of a focus on watching cutscenes or reading text and not enough focus on actually playing the game and doing things. Most of the way that you interact with the game is by following the instructions that pop up in the lower corner of the screen and by shooting stuff. There's some light puzzling, nothing too taxing, and a bit of exploration in some chapters, but that's about it. Generally, the game is very linear and unchallenging (on the default difficulty, anyway), and, apart from the combat, I rarely thought that I had agency over what I was actually doing in it. It's very much got its own story to tell and is at pains to convey this to the player at every opportunity, but this comes at the expense of variety and interactivity. I often found it quite a passive experience.

The combat itself is mixed. It works a lot better when you play as Saga, one of the game's two protagonists, who gets to shoot flesh and blood enemies in the spooky woods that surround the Pacific north-western town of Bright Falls. It's not as good, though, when you play as the other protagonist, Alan himself, who has to put up with annoying shadow monsters who flit about very quickly and, by their very nature, are quite difficult to actually see on the screen. My favourite part of the game, tellingly, was when it left me off the leash towards the end and I was able to back-track through the different areas as Saga, mopping up collectibles I'd missed the first time around. It was only at this point when I felt like I wasn't being constantly interrupted by cut-scenes or getting bossed around by the game telling me to do specific things in specific places in order to proceed. When the story isn't getting in the way and you're left to do things for yourself, the fundamental third-person shooter bones of the game are actually pretty decent, but there just wasn't enough of it for me.

As for the story, something similar can be said about my experience here: I found Saga's much more interesting - an intriguing cult killing investigation - than Alan's - a convoluted mess about who the fuck knows what. Both sides of the tale are stretched too thin, however, and as they began to inevitably converge in the third act, I must admit I started to lose interest. And while the occasional comic scene or weird snippet broke through the post-modern, meta-textual, shared universe, timey-wimey fug of it all, the sudden ending and cut to black left me feeling not very much of anything much, which was a shame.

So yes, a mixed experience, all told. It's a gorgeous game that I'm glad I experienced, and I think the developers should be commended for making something like it in the first place at such obvious great expense. But to be really enjoyable, I need my games to feel good in the hands and be satisfying to play, and that was only the case here some of the time. That said, I'll be interested to play the upcoming DLC, but I'm still yet to be entirely won over by Remedy's games more generally. I completed Control for the first time last week, and although it was definitely flawed, I preferred it to this. They've yet to make anything better than an 8/10 for me, however, despite all the shininess.

Not too much to say about this one. It's been on my list for a while and I polished it off this weekend in a few sittings. It's Gears, but on a tropical island setting, so you know what to expect. You progress from one linear environment dotted with waist-high blocks to the next, shooting gribbly alien monsters making your way from set-piece to set-piece. There's the bit when you're stuck on a moving object for a while as you try to fend off enemies who shoot down at you. There's the bit where you have to defend your position against enemy hordes for a set amount of time. There's an almost ridiculous amount of sliding down slopes on your backside while shooting. There's a couple of boss battles. Stop me if you've heard this before.

It looks lovely on ultra-wide with everything turned up to eleven, and it clips by at a decent pace for its three hour run-time, but I imagine it'll prove entirely forgettable. It's probably best played with a couple of mates as a co-op campaign that you can get through in three or four sessions, one that's not going to take up too much of your time or brain power.

I've tried this a couple of times before now and always got fed up and/or lost after a few hours. I wanted to give it another go, however, after I enjoyed what I played of Alan Wake 2 (unfortunately, technical problems stopped me from playing any more of that game) and fancied a bit more Remedy weirdness. This time, I was able to see it through.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with Control. Launching huge chunks of masonry into enemies never got old, and the visual effects and style remained striking throughout. Parts of it didn't work as well for me, however, especially the map, which remains godawful and put me off exploring or doing most of the additional missions. I tried to follow some advice I read elsewhere about ignoring the map entirely and just following the signposts instead, and while this worked most of the time, there were a few occasions where I just couldn't make out where the game wanted me to go and ended up looking it up in a huff. I also wasn't especially enthralled by the story, which I know a number of the game's fans really go to bat for. It was fine, but I didn't like how most of it was told through collectible files, and the ending was a bit of a damp squib.

Still, flying about like Neo and hurling forklifts at people in a destructible environment is good fun, especially with all the ray-traced shininess, so I might play the two DLC chapters when the Ultimate Edition of the game comes to Game Pass next week. I understand they're supposed to offer a bit more variety while still being self-contained, so we'll see.

I've had a naff couple of weeks in terms of gaming, starting a couple of things but abandoning them after ten hours or so and not knowing what to play. Then I saw this in my Epic library and thought I'd give it its bi-annual playthrough to check that it's still one of my favourite games of all time, and of course it fucking is. Eight years old now and often imitated but never once bettered. An absolute masterpiece of horror, animation and pitch black humour. Strikingly beautiful at times, too. Absolutely essential.